This
term, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “an
act of bravado in which a person loads (usually) one chamber of a revolver,
spins the cylinder, holds the barrel to his head, and pulls the trigger”,
made its first appearance in written English in 1937.It was used at that time by Georges Surdez in a short story
he wrote for Collier’s magazine entitled “Russian Roulette”.The term first appears in that story in the following passage:

'…did
you ever hear of Russian Roulette?’When I said I had not, he told me all about it.When he was with the Russian army in Rumania, around 1917, and
things were cracking up, so that their officers felt that they were not
only losing prestige, money, family, and country, but were being also
dishonored before their colleagues of the allied armies, some officer
would suddenly pull out his revolver, anywhere, at the table, in a café,
at a gathering of friends, remove a cartridge from the cylinder, spin the
cylinder, snap it back in place, put it to his head, and pull the trigger.There were five chances to one that the hammer would set off a live
cartridge and blow his brains all over the place.Sometimes it happened, sometimes not.

It
is interesting to note that Surdez describes above a version of Russian
roulette in which five chambers of the gun’s cylinder hold cartridges,
whereas today the understanding is that only one chamber holds a bullet.However, Surdez mentions both the five-cartridge and one-cartridge
versions of this “game” in his short story.Cecil Adams makes the
point that the five-cartridge version is basically suicide, while the
one-cartridge variety is indeed more a game of chance.The latter is the form associated with the term Russian roulette
today.

All
the available evidence suggests that Surdez made up the term based on the
reputation Russian soldiers and officers had for violent and
self-destructive behavior.It
is just possible that he heard it somewhere else and adopted it for his
story, but if so, we have no record of this earlier source.By the way, Mr. Surdez was not very prolific, at least not as far as
his widely-published material goes.The
only other work we could find by him was “Restricted!”, which was
published in Adventure magazine in December of 1947.

The
figurative use of the term Russian roulette occurred at least by 1960; in
1976 even the medical journal The Lancet got in on the act:
“Abusive parents are often the scarred survivors of generations of
reproductive russian roulette.”The metaphorical meaning of the phrase had become “playing
recklessly with chance”.

How
on earth did Russians gain a reputation for playing such a deadly game?While Russian officers of the Revolution and World War I eras were
known for being violent and reckless, even depressed, crazed or drunk to the
point of suicide, there is absolutely no evidence that they engaged in what
we call Russian roulette.Cecil
Adams did, however, find a Russian novel, A Hero of Our Time, by
Mikhail Lermontov (published in 1840 and translated by Vladimir Nabokov in
1958), in which a character engages in behavior which is similar to Russian
roulette:A group of officers,
bored one evening, argue over the notion of predestination.A Serbian among them takes the position that one’s fate is
predestined, betting against the others that he is correct.To illustrate this, he takes up a gun which is hanging on display on
the wall, puts it to his head, and pulls the trigger.Nothing happens.He next
aims the firearm at the ceiling and pulls the trigger, and a shot is fired.His companions pay their bets in amazement.Only a few hours after that event, the Serbian is murdered by
a drunk.

Now
that we know why this game was associated with the Russians, even if they
never actually played it, why is it known as roulette?Roulette is a game of chance where a wheel with numbered
compartments is spun, and a small ball is placed on the spinning wheel.The number of the compartment where the ball stops is the winning
number.Spinning the cylinder
of a gun after placing a bullet inside it is likened to spinning the
roulette wheel.Roulette
is a French word and is simply the diminutive form of rouelle
“wheel”.Rouelle
comes from the Indo-European root ret- “to run, roll”, which is
the source of English words like roll, rotate, rodeo
and round.The word roulette
referring to the particular game of chance first appeared in the English
written record in 1745.There is an earlier occurrence of the word, in about 1734,
with the meaning “small wheel”, but that meaning is now obsolete.

Your
Etymological Queries Answered

We tend associate this word with
stage conjurors and, as a result, might therefore hazard a guess that it's...
ooh... maybe as old as the last century, right? Wrong. This word is truly ancient.

Abracadabra was first
recorded in Gnostic amulets of the 3rd century A.D. and was once thought to be a
word of real magical power. The amulets were worn
around the neck and were supposed to protect against fever. The word was inscribed in
the form of a triangle, thus:

A

B

R

A

C

A

D

A

B

R

A

As you may have noticed, the word abracadabra
appears twice in this charm: once in the top row and once again if you read the
right column from bottom to top. The ultimate origin of the word is uncertain
but it may be related to the Gnostic deity called Abraxas, who was also
known as Aeon.

A

B

R

A

C

A

D

A

B

R

A

B

R

A

C

A

D

A

B

A

B

R

A

C

A

D

A

A

B

R

A

C

A

D

A

B

R

A

C

A

A

B

R

A

C

A

B

R

A

A

B

R

A

B

A

Another popular, not to say
cliché, "magic word" is presto. This is merely the Italian for
"quickly" so, when a conjuror cries "Presto, be gone...
away, fly, vanish" (from "The Case Is Altered", Ben Johnson,
1598), he merely means "go quickly away".

In the mid-17th
century presto was said to be "a word used by juglers [sic] in their
Hocus Pocus tricks." Now,
this hocus pocus is also quite fascinating as it is thought to be a
garbled borrowing from the Latin Mass. At the high point of the
mass, bread and wine are (magically) transformed into the actual body and blood
of Jesus Christ. The priest then raises up the body of Christ and quotes Jesus'
own words at the Last Supper, saying "This is my body..." or, in the
original Latin, Hoc est corpus meum... It was this hoc est
corpus which became hocus pocus.

From Joyce Wang:

I would like to know
the etymology of exotic.

Originally, exotic
meant merely "foreign". It derives from the Greek exotikos,
and ultimately from exo, which
signifies "from outside", "foreign". Thus, in the 17th
century, one writer remarked that the Welsh language "hath
the least mixture of Exotick words of any now used in Europe."

With time exotic came to
acquire connotations of the strange and the bizarre, notions which are naturally
associated with far-flung, foreign lands. In the 1950s, U.S. strip-tease
dancers came to be called exotic dancers, perhaps playing on the
similarity to the word erotic.

The Indo-European root from which the Greek is descended is eghs
"out". Other words having eghs as their source are exoteric,
exoskeleton, and synecdoche.

From John :

Please tell me the origin
of the word bulldozer.

This word first appears in writing in
1876 as the verb bulldoze which meant "intimidate by
violence". A bulldozer was therefore "one who intimidates
by violence". It is suggested that the word is simply a compound of bull
"male cow" and dose referring to a "dose" of
whipping. The idea is supposedly that the dose of whipping was severe
enough for a bull.

Bulldoze may have been influenced by the bull in bullwhip.
Bulldozing is thought by some to have arisen after the American Civil
War, when blacks were sometimes given a bull-dose by racist whites in
order to coerce them to vote for a certain candidate. The "pushing
around" meaning behind the term apparently came to be applied to machinery
which pushed earth around, some time in the late 1920s; the term is first
recorded with that meaning in 1930.

From Nyrican:

How did cheese get
its name?

This is a very old word in English; it goes back to Old English
where it was cése or cýse.
It comes ultimately from Latin caseus "cheese"; in fact, Latin
gave the word to many of the Germanic languages (Dutch kaas,
German käse). Spanish queso
comes from Latin, as well.

Where Latin got caseus is
not clear, but John Ayto, for one, suggests that it may be related to Sanskrit kvathate
"to boil", which could refer to the frothiness of the milk from which
cheese is made, or to the cooking of milk to make the cheese. However, while kvathikaa
means "a decoction made from milk" there is no direct mention of
cheese or even of milk in this word. It just means "something
boiled". In the cow-centered society which used the Sanskrit
language, milk was considered the most wholesome (and holy) of liquids and boiling
implied "boiling in milk".

Where do we get the
word rave "party"? What's the origin of the word rave?

The verb rave
was first used in writing by the venerable Chaucer in the late 14th century.
In Troilus and Criseyde he wrote: "Ye ben so wylde it semeth Þat
ye raue" ("You be so wild it seems that you rave").
At that time, as it does today, the word meant "to be mad or show signs of
madness; to talk or declaim wildly due to madness or some great passion".
By the early 17th century the word had acquired a similar yet less dire meaning:
"to speak in a frenzied or enthusiastic manner" and then "to
speak of something with enthusiasm". It is the latter which gave us
current usages such as rave reviews and "she raves
about him". The
"frenzied or enthusiastic" meaning also lent itself to a noun in the
late 16th century, and that is ultimately where rave
"party" comes from. This usage is first recorded in 1960 in
London, and refers to such parties being frenzied or exciting. In those
early days it was most often encountered in the form rave-up, as in
"There's a rave-up at Peter's house tonight". This was
soon abbreviated to rave, especially in the case of all-night parties
which were called all-night raves.

Rave's
etymology is debatable. One school suggests that it derives from a variant
form of Old French rêver
"to dream, be delirious" (reverie comes from the same
source). Another
group believes it to come from Latin rabia, a Late Latin form of Latin rabies
(which English took in the same form), from Latin rabere
"to rage" (and rage
comes from rabies, as well, via Provençal).

wherein Barb Dwyer
calls down the wrath of heaven on those who say

the millennia
is coming

I know most of you didn't
study Latin, so here's a quick lesson: nouns which have a nominative
singular inflection of -um are of the 3rd declension, are of the
neuter gender, and take a nominative plural inflection of -a.
Got that?

Oh well. I'll say again,
slowly. Millennium (which has two l's and two n's,
by the way) is a case in point. The plural is millennia.

Mr. Dwyer and I went to see
a new movie called "Dogma" last weekend. It was quite a
jolly little flick but my enjoyment was impaired by a fallen angel whining
that he had waited "a millennia". For that solecism
alone the script-writers should be "cast into the outer darkness
where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth". It would seem
that angels have a hard time with grammatical number, for Metatron, a
character played by Alan Rickman, proclaims himself to be both "the
voice of God" and "a seraphim". What he should
have said, of course, was "I am a seraph", seraphim
being the plural form. It raises an interesting theological problem:
can God make grammatical errors in Hebrew? Well, if She couldn't, it
would be a lapse of omnipotence, I suppose.

So don't let me hear any of
you saying "The millennia is coming" or I'll take a fiery
sword to the lot of you... or maybe just detention for the whole class.

In Issue
25 (January 25, 1999) you discussed the 'Net legend of the origins of extending one's middle finger as an obscene gesture. While I agree that
this is undoubtedly an incorrect origin for the gesture in question, I believe I have found the basis for the origin of the legend. I've been
reading a history of the Hundred Years War (the period during which the supposed origin occurred),
The Hundred Years War, The English in France, 1337-1453 by Desmond Seward. In it he discusses the battle of Agincourt
and events leading up to it. The English, under King Henry V, were badly outnumbered by the French forces under the Dauphin (the English had only
about 5000 archers and around 800 men-at-arms - the French fielded an army
totaling 40,000 to 50,000).

I quote from the book; "King Henry heard three Masses and took communion
before addressing his men. He told them 'he was come into France to recover his lawful inheritance', and that the French had promised to cut
three fingers off every English Archer's right hand so 'they might never presume again to shoot at man or horse'." The author does not indicate
whether or not this threat had actually come from the French, or if King Henry had merely made it up as propaganda (the latter seems most likely to me).

The quotes attributed to King Henry V are apparently from "the narrative
of a chaplain who rode with his army." The French, of course, through much
of the Hundred Years War, learned to respect and fear the English long-bowmen who could shoot arrows very accurately over a fairly long
range. The English found that by placing archers where they would be on the flanks of a French attack, the French forces could be severely weakened
before they met the main body of the English forces. The long bow was especially effective against the French cavalry because the horses of the
day had little or no protection from the arrows.

Thanks for the information, though Mike
insists on putting in his two-pennyworth and saying that the "English
long-bowmen" were, in fact, Welsh mercenaries.

From John
Broussard:

Every week I learn something new from your site. For years I thought John Locke was the first one to view our minds as a
tabula rasa at birth. Now I find that Aristotle antedated him by two
millennia with that notion (presumably in its Greek
equivalent). Any idea where I can run that down in Aristotle's writings? No rush to answer, since I suspect you have other
fish to fry. (Now where did that phrase come from?)

Kudos for the marvelous debunking of the Lynch speech. Let's have more of that.

From Kathy Smith:

First of all, I really enjoy your e-zine and look forward to reading each new
issue.

No discussion regarding the term "tabula rasa" could be complete without at
least a passing mention of the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704).
He was responsible for fully fleshing out the concept that man is not born
with innate understanding, but gains knowledge through experience, in his Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690).

From John Archdeacon:

I was rather brought by Barb's weepin' an' a-wailin' this
week [in Issue 60's
Curmudgeons' Corner]. I'm glad this issue was taken to my attention (as if I hadn't noticed) - I bring
my hat off to her!

"Hello, Noddy", said Big Ears, as Noddy rode up to him with that
familiar "take, take".

OK, OK, I'll bring a hike...

For our American readers who don't know,
Noddy and Big Ears are characters in a series of children's books written
by English author Enid Blyton. Noddy's car has a bell on it which,
in the books, goes "bring, bring".